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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-511-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>From Canopy to Crown: High-Fidelity Tree Façade Synthesis from Nadir LiDAR data</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Sharma</surname>
<given-names>Raghav</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Frank</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liu</surname>
<given-names>Jane</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7760-2788</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Hu</surname>
<given-names>Baoxin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Computer Science, University of Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M7, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Department of Computer Science, University of Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M7, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-2-2026</volume>
<fpage>511</fpage>
<lpage>516</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Raghav Sharma et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/511/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-511-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/511/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-511-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/511/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-511-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/511/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-511-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Synthesizing realistic fa&amp;ccedil;ade views of individual trees from nadir-view remote sensing data would transform large-scale forest analysis, yet remains unsolved due to data scarcity and task ambiguity. We present the first conditional diffusion model to generate structurally plausible fa&amp;ccedil;ade views of individual tree crowns from single nadir-view LiDAR rasters, leveraging the FOR-species20K benchmark dataset. Our approach integrates nadir projections with tree species and height within a U-Net-based denoising diffusion framework. Experiments demonstrate that nadir imagery alone is insufficient, but conditioning on species and height enables synthesis of visually realistic, species-specific fa&amp;ccedil;ade views. The fully conditioned model achieves substantial gains in perceptual (LPIPS: 0.184) and structural (SSIM: 0.576) similarity, outperforming nadir-only baselines by more than twofold. Our results establish that ancillary attributes critically constrain the solution space, enabling diffusion models to infer plausible structures from ambiguous nadir input. This work demonstrates a scalable path to enriching nadir-based forest inventories with synthesized structural detail, reducing the need for resource-intensive ground surveys.</p>
</abstract>
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